"All the intervening layers slipped away, and I lost myself in the game within the game."
This sucked. This quest was stupid and she was already mentally done with Adrien Agreste.
She wondered if it was possible to hate someone without ever knowing them.
This kid didn't want to be found. There was a reason he was hiding in some far off city and the best programmers weren't able to find him.
She had to give credit where credit was due, though. To be able to hide in the game without anyone being able to find them? That was knowledge and skill. It was mildly impressive.
But still infuriating.
She had been in the game for what felt like an excessive amount of time. The PHENOM usually only allowed users five hours maximum in the game. The PHENOM VR helmet left people in a catatonic state until they were able to log off, and people usually didn't want to.
The software was designed to manually kick people out at the five hour limit. People could buy timer hacks from the black market to use on PHENOM, though they came with a risk. If you were ever found guilty of using the hacks, you would get banned for life from the VR world. Most people weren't willing to risk destroying their fantasy for thirty extra minutes.
Marinette was one of those people who cheated the system. With game developers for parents and friends obsessed with the underhanded dealings of the game, it was no wonder that she had cheats for days. Her mother, the renowned Sabine Dupain-Cheng, had even written a few secret dialogue bits to turn off all cheats and enhancements. Marinette's favorite phrase was, "There's just two ways this can end, and in both of them, you die!" It was from an older game she and her father had played when she was younger, so it held a special place in her heart.
Plus, it was funny. It made her sound tougher than she was, which was a bonus.
But it was kind of draining, if she was being honest. Even though her physical body was in a state of rest, her in-game persona was starting to get strained. She was almost at her destination- maybe ten more minutes of running through immaculately designed landscapes and she'd finally reach the site of Adrien's disappearance.
Slightly ahead in the distance was the entrance to the Forest of Runes. But, off to the side, there was a swirling, pulsing black portal. And because she was already acting like a white mom in a horror movie, she decided to go check it out, after saving her location so she could return if something happened. Stepping forward, her hand outstretched, she touched the portal and was immediately thrown into blackness.
If she were in her physical body, she would take some deep breaths to slow her heart rate. But those things didn't matter here. All that mattered is how fast and how well her brain could instruct her virtual body to operate.
Marinette stepped into the room and heard the doors shut behind her.
She glanced around.
It was white everywhere, with no signs of entrance or exit. A few seconds later, a message appeared in black inky cursive across the walls:
Lose yourself in the game within the game.
As the words begin to fade, she readied herself for whatever was coming next.
It happened faster than expected.
The floor dropped open. Marinette began to fall.
She unhooked her trusty magic yo-yo from her side and shot it towards the white expanse of the sky. She looked down to quickly assess her situation.
Holy cats.
Three dorsal fins circled in the water below her, less than three feet away.
Suddenly she felt like a worm on the end of a hook. She began to panic, trying to make sense of the competing voices yelling at each other inside her brain.
GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!
NO! YOU CAN DO THIS!
She pulled her yo-yo back into her palm as fast as she could, and proceeded to launch it at the sharks. Quickly looping her string around the animals and wrangling them together, she felt a sense of pride. This wouldn't be so bad. But it seemed as if Adrien Agreste had left quite a maze to get through to find him, and with her competitive streak, there was no was Marinette would lose. Not on her life. Or on any of her extra lives either.
Heh.
Marinette had been killed many times in virtual battle, but never virtually eaten, and she hoped she never would be. Even though the logical part of her brain knew she wouldn't feel any pain while it happened and that she would regenerate within seconds, she didn't think she could live with the image of her torso torn in half.
She twirled around on the top of the bound sharks in victory, waiting for what would happen next. Sure enough, the shark tank disappeared and the white room returned.
A door slides open in front of her and she exited the room into a maze. The maze is all white too, corridors upon corridors, mostly leading to dead ends. Marinette reached her right arm out and drug her fingers along the wall, always making right turns no matter what.
Within a few minutes, she discovered a button on the wall. She pushed it. Another door appeared and opened before her. As soon as she stepped inside, the door closed, and once again she was trapped in a white box with no visible signs of entry or exit. She wondered, illogically, if any of this could take a physical toll. If it could, actually, hurt her somehow.
I need to end this now, she thought, before she found herself swallowed whole and have a heart attack back in the real world. The walls slowly started shrinking in on her and she could feel her heart rate starting to beat in double-time.
It's just a game, she reminded herself. I figure it's only a matter of seconds before my ribcage gets crushed, sending me back to the Lost City to start all over again.
That was so not going to happen.
She sat down, and braced her hands and feet against the walls pushing down on her. Her eyes flitted around for a moment until-
EUREKA!
She quickly took the boot off her left foot and wedged the high part underneath one of the closing walls, hoping that stopping one wall would stop them all. And, like magic, it worked.
"And the crowd goes wild," she said to no one, letting out a big sigh as the compressing walls finally disappeared.
She stood and began to follow the walls again, always turning right, until reaching another button.
A moment later, Marinette was standing on a long rickety rope bridge between two high granite cliffs. Several planks were missing from the bridge, threatening to drop her into the sea of boiling orange lava below. She was just gathering her bearings when the pterodactyl attacked.
The five dive-bombing dinos did their best to knock her into the lava gorge or spear her with their pointy beaks on their swooping attacks, but they were no match for this girl/weapon combo.
She and her yo-yo performed like a beautiful machine, a symphony of movement, a perfect, deadly blend of accuracy and precision. It's like the yo-yo and I have morphed into one body, she thought.
She picked them off one by one, until the last one fell . . .
. . . onto the rope bridge.
Oops.
The bridge sagged under the weight of the pterodactyl, then snapped in two.
She grabbed for the ropes and went swinging down like Tarzan, skimming the boiling lava, and smashing into the granite wall.
Ouch is all she had time to think before her skull cracked against the granite.
She woke up in the Lost City. "Adrien Agreste, you asshole!" she yelled. "I know that isn't very nice, but I don't care. At this point I thoroughly despise Adrien Agreste and his creepy fright fest. And now I have to start over again. I just lost thirty valuable minutes of time, not to mention a piece of my sanity. No wonder some people end up mental."
Marinette was lucky she had saved her location outside of the Forest of Runes and was able to teleport.
It's one thing to create your own game, to know who your enemies will be before you go in. Like those Choose Your Own Adventure books for kids. Let's say you decide to battle a dragon. You still feel a thrill of fear once that dragon starts chasing you with his razor-sharp claws and fiery breath, but at least you chose him, and if you're any good, you also equipped yourself with some decent weaponry to fight him. It's another thing entirely to battle unknown enemies that another player chose. It's like someone telling you there's a monster under your bed, then forcing you to stick your head down there to look.
There aren't enough chill pills in the world to get over that kind of mind game.
But...
She was not giving up yet. Not now that she knew how to play.
She was on a mission now to haul Adrien Agreste's sorry butt back home so she could swear at him in person and make him grovel for mercy.
She went back towards the portal, armed herself with her yo-yo, and started over.
This time around she killed off the sharks and escaped the claustrophobia maze with speed and efficiency. She was nowhere near as anxious on this run because she knew what to expect. It was still pretty terrifying, of course, but she just kept repeating her mantra whenever the fear started to take over: It's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game . . .
She took down the pterodactyls even faster this time, and when the last one slammed onto the bridge, she was ready for it. She threw her yo-yo towards the moorings at the top of the cliff and it wrapped securely, the force from her fall wrenching her arm painfully. She let out a yell and gritted her teeth against the lightning pain through her arm, but it was too late. Her fingers loosened and her yo-yo could not save her.
Down she went, straight into the boiling lava.
Marinette doesn't yell this time when she woke up in the Lost City. Instead, she allowed herself to daydream about all the things she would say to Adrien Agreste when she found him. They were very unpleasant things, things which should never ever be uttered aloud, lest you be struck dead by whichever God is currently on duty. It was a risk she was willing to take.
This time, she defeated the sharks before they knew she was there. She make sure to incapacitate the five wheeling pterodactyls at the three-o'clock or nine-o'clock positions, so they fell straight into the lava and stayed away from the bridge.
Finally, the lava gorge dissolved to white.
Victory at last. She stood still for a few minutes, allowing herself to have plenty of time to prep for the next obstacle. She was determined to win the next one the first time through, as a point of pride.
Also, I'll scream if I wake up in the Landing one more time, she thought.
Just before she pushed the next button to the next room, she swallowed down a pricey speed potion she acquired just for this purpose.
The whiteness turns into a golden haze, and it took her a moment to get her bearings. She was in a desert, melting hot, and the sun was shining brightly into her eyes. She spun around in a circle to mark the location of my foes. Maybe it would be easy. And then she spotted them.
Giant Scorpions? Not so easy.
Papa was at four o'clock, shiny and black and the biggest of them, his stinger raised to a height about twice her own five feet eight inches. Mama was at eight o'clock, copper-tinted and moving slowly, biding her sweet time. And Baby was positioned directly at twelve o'clock, an iridescent greenish blue like a dragonfly and the smallest of the three, but also the fastest and coming right at me.
"Okay, let's get this done," she said to herself. Marinette ran as fast as she could toward Baby, brandishing her yo-yo. She moved like a panther, legs pumping at least twice their normal speed, and she felt like she was about to go airborne. She'd never used a speed potion before—performance enhancements have always been way out of her price range—and it almost felt like cheating.
Baby saw her and raised his stinger even higher without losing speed. I can't believe I'm playing a game of chicken with a Giant Scorpion, she thought, but here we are, running at each other like freight trains about to collide. "Wait for it . . . wait for it," she muttered as it got closer and closer, and then SWISH, down came his stinger, straight at her heart.
Marinette threw her yo-yo out and pulled tight, suspending the stinger in mid-air. Baby let out an even louder high-pitched screech when he realizes he's stuck. For a second she wondered if scorpions screech in real life, but then Baby lifted his tail with her arm and yo-yo still attached, and her mind snapped back to the task at hand. She pulled down on her yo-yo string as hard as she could and sliced Baby's tail clean off.
Baby let out one last screech before he dissolved in thin air and Marinette fell to the sand. There was no time to brush herself off. If Papa and Mama were dangerous before, they were in a murderous rage now. They came charging at her from opposite sides and it was all she could do to hold her ground between them.
They skittered around her, their black and copper stingers rained down in syncopated rhythm. Two Papa strikes for every Mama strike. As she tumbled and dodged, flipping in between their tails like a Chinese acrobat on speed, she took note of their movements. Papa's strikes were more forceful and rapid, but Mama had accuracy going for her.
Just as Papa raised his tail to strike again, she rolled between Mama's coppery legs. CRUNCH. Papa's stinger plunged itself into Mama's back. Mama screeched and her body went into defensive auto-pilot. Marinette heard another CRUNCH as Mama's stinger plunged into Papa.
Papa didn't even complain, he just took it like a boss and dissolved into the sand, locked in the fatal embrace of his wife.
Whew.
She sat down, shading herself until the desert turned back into the white room. She was exultant for a minute before a hideous realization descended on her like a school of poison jellyfish. The known portions of the maze were now complete. She didn't know what to expect or what kind of monsters to watch for. It was all guesswork. And if she failed, it was back to the beginning. All of it—all over again.
It was enough to make a weaker person, a person who in no way resembled her, cry.
She followed the white wall, which had become like her own yellow brick road, without a comforting trio of friends or trusty dog to help her out.
She made her way through twists and turns in the white wall until she finally reached a red button.
She pushed the button and stepped into the room, yo-yo cocked and ready.
A face appeared on the white wall in front of her. It was a pretty woman's face, pleasant and smiling
"Checkpoint complete," she said in a soothing, robotic voice. "Checkpoint complete."
Praise the Lord and pass the life hearts! Adrien Agreste actually included save points in his horrid little game. She would never have to face those stinking sharks again, let alone all the other creatures. She was so happy she could cry. Marinette smiled back at the nice checkpoint lady. Maybe she'll take her to Adrien.
Only now her face didn't look as pleasant as it did a second ago. Her eyes were turning red and her hair was turning white. Her teeth began to . . . sharpen? . . . transforming her pleasant smile into a creepy, evil grin, as if she was now selling one-way bus tickets on the highway to hell.
Marinette instinctively raised her yo-yo, though the face was no more than a projection.
The lights went out. Marinette was surrounded in the pitch darkness.
Panic froze her to the spot until something in her brain kicked into gear.
"He's feeding on phobias, and fear of the dark is a huge one," she said out loud to keep herself company. "Remember how you used to turn on not one but three night-lights in your bedroom?"
Sometimes she still slept with three night-lights. After today she was probably going to need four.
"It's just a game, it's just a game," she repeated to herself. Marinette had a moment of realization. In her game inventory, she had a pair of night-vision goggles. Perfect for use in creepy mini-games with demented hags made by a coding master teen/psychopath.
She equipped the goggles and closed her character viewing screen.
The hag was directly in front of her, the demonic face inches from hers. An icy coldness seeped from her body like a thick fog. Marinette felt like she had just stepped into a deep freeze.
"RUN!" she screamed, her hideous voice stabbing at Marinette's ears like a dagger.
She doesn't need to tell her twice. She took off.
The door to the room was open and she ran back into the maze, which was now steeped in darkness. The night-vision goggles turned everything ghoulish green. She ran wildly, terrified of what she might find ahead of her, but even more horrified by what was behind her. She risked a quick peek back and wished she hadn't. The woman was flying behind her like a ghostly white witch, her teeth bared in that horrible grin. Her long bony arms stretched out before her, and her hands, which looked more like sharp talons, tried to grab on to any part of Marinette that she could reach. She started to cackle then, louder and louder until the cackle turned into a high-pitched shriek that made her head feel like it might explode.
She ran left and right and this way and that, completely lost, completely out of her wits. She couldn't think straight, couldn't do anything but try to outrun her outstretched claws, her hideous shrieking. Marinette make another left and hit a dead end.
She felt the hag's icy hands scrape across her back. Her talons cut through cloth and bone and a searing cold permeated Marinette's chest, freezing and burning all at once.
She's ripping my heart out, her mind screamed as she slipped into unconsciousness.
Yep. Dead end.
Literally.
When she woke up, she was back in the white room with the robotic lady's floating head smiling at her from the wall. Damn. No rest for the wicked. She positioned her goggles, aimed her yo-yo straight ahead, and waited for the lights to go out.
A second later, all was dark. Leering banshee straight ahead.
She aimed her yo-yo right at her horrible mouth. THWACK!
It went right through her.
"RUN!" she screamed.
Oh God.
She ran. She couldn't bear the thought of those icy hands reaching into her body again. She shouldn't be able to feel them. Why can she feel them? She wasn't sure she even cared at this point. She tried to keep her hand along the right wall, always going right, but the inky green darkness confused her, and the night-vision goggles messed with her peripheral vision.
Think, think, think!
She whirled around and tried the yo-yo again. It was like shooting a water gun at a piranha. Totally ineffective.
She kept running, but was lost again now that she took her hand off the right wall to shoot her yo-yo.
Damn damn damn.
She didn't even notice the dead end this time until she ran smack into it.
She felt a frosty stab of pain enter between her shoulder blades, like she had just been impaled by an icicle.
The banshee stole her heart again.
She did the same thing twelve times in all, with slight variations. Each time, she tried another tactic, but she might as well have been battling whipped cream or clouds, only not so fluffy and pleasing.
Twelve times the lights went out, twelve times her ghoulish face appeared inches from Marinette's panicked face, twelve times she tried to kill her with the yo-yo, twelve times she didn't die, twelve times she screamed "RUN!", twelve times Marinette ran like her pants were on fire, twelve times she got lost, twelve times she felt her arctic claw reach inside her rib cage and rip her heart out.
Twelve flipping times she wanted to give up and yell out and give up and return to the real world without Adrien in tow. But she was not a quitter. She remembered when she was little, maybe eight years old, and was playing a game on Dad's old gaming console. It took her twenty-eight attempts to beat the final boss at the end. She remembered begging her dad to fight the battle for her, but all he said was, "Keep at it. Each time you try, you sweeten the victory." And it was true. That twenty-ninth attempt—that successful attempt—was so incredibly delicious that she had jumped on her bed for ten minutes afterward out of pure happiness.
As she prepared for her lucky thirteenth try, she tapped into her inventory once again and tried desperately to think of some trick, some new thing, something "out of the box" to defeat the hag, but once again she didn't have time to think. The lights went out and the ghoulfriend was in her face again screaming "RUN!"
She hadn't even armed herself this time. She accessed her inventory and grabbed the first weapon she could get looked down to find Nino's trusty Agatha- the sword he named after his grandmother-in her hands. Oh for God's sake. Agatha was nothing more than a bent, rusty butter knife.
It was so absurd that she started laughing. She looked right into the banshee's red eyes and only flinched slightly. She had looked into her hideous face so many times now she was getting used to it. Might as well skip to the chase at this point, or skip the chase altogether, as the case happened to be. "Go ahead," she said bravely, sticking out her chest. "Just rip it right out."
They both stood there for a moment—technically, the banshee floated—and engaged in an intense staring contest. She was really good at that game, honed by hours of matches with Nino during eighth-grade study hall. Marinette blew a puff of air into her eyes, and her icy eyelids fluttered. "Made you blink," she sang, mainly to amuse herself while she waited for the heart snatchery that wass to come.
Only it didn't.
The banshee backed away from her and the lights went back on. She removed her night-vision goggles and saw the white wall swallow her up until only her face is showing . . . her horrible, witchy face, which slowly transformed back into my favorite, smiling, not-evil lady.
"CHECKPOINT COMPLETE," said the soothing robotic voice. "CHECKPOINT COMPLETE."
She was almost too stunned to move.
She didn't know what happened back there, but she was pretty sure she could now add Blinking Contest Goddess to her college applications.
A door in the white wall slid open and she saw what looked like a room full of PHENOM personas on the other side.
"You've got to be kidding me," she muttered, stepping tentatively across the threshold and looking around in wonder.
Yep. She was in a bar.
Not just any bar either, but a really swank one populated by happy, beautiful people, who sat at a long, glossy counter and raised shiny glasses at each other. They all looked fabulous in a sort of half-historical, half-modern way, like she was somewhere frozen in time. Some of the people are speaking English and others were speaking French.
She glanced around the mahogany interior, yo-yo at the ready. She wasn't sure if this was a safe place or if she was still stuck in Adrien's sadistic mini-game, but she thought it best to be cautious just in case. Near what she presumed was the entrance, she saw a sign denoting the name of the bar as Agreste Tavern. This had to be the right place if he had written his last name into the bar's code.
Marinette sidled up to the bar, and flashed the bartender a wide smile she didn't quite feel. People were always more willing to dole out information if you started with a smile. "Excuse me, sir. I was wondering if you knew an Adrien Agreste?"
"Oui, mademoiselle. Monsieur Adrien is the owner, I would hope I know him," he replied with a wink. Perfect.
"Is he here tonight?" she asked as nonchalantly as possible, leaning back against the bar and eyeing anyone in the crowd who looked like they might be an Adrien.
"No, mademoiselle. Not tonight. But you could always try again tomorrow? Monsieur Adrien loves pretty things, I'm sure he would be quite taken with you." Marinette blushed a bit at that, not sure how to respond. She was disappointed that Adrien wasn't there, but she also knew he was probably close by if he was a regular.
"That's all I needed to know. Merci!" and she marched right out the front door.
She was at the corner of an intersection, where streetlights and headlights and neon signs lit up the tall, balconied buildings lining the streets. The cars were big and wide and old-timey, with giant chrome fenders and hood ornaments, and painted with pretty pastel colors. People strolled the streets, smiling and laughing, like they were all off to a party and not just strings of code. The air was warm, but a cool breeze blew, smelling of the sea. Marinette was astounded. She could smell things in this world, feel and taste things. She was also confused. She had no idea where to go, or how this world had been mapped. Also, given the dozens of people walking around, Adrien could easily hide himself among them.
She started following a group of young people up the street. The young men were dressed in lightweight suits and ties, while the girls wore fancy flapper-style dresses that cling to their curves. Maybe they'll lead her to Adrien. If there's one thing she learned about pulling teenage boys out of PHENOM, it was this: when in doubt, follow the hot girls.
The group turned down a few more streets and Marinette could hear music throbbing from several clubs—jazz and pianos all at once. She wondered if one of these clubs might be where Adrien was hiding.
"Don't turn around," said a gruff voice from behind her as she felt cold metal on the back of her neck. "Keep walking and keep quiet."
"Oh please," she muttered under her breath. She was almost enjoying this custom world, but now she was being mugged by some virtual thug. Oh well, it was better than a shark tank, and maybe this would lead her to Adrien. He probably made himself a mob boss or something.
"Where are we going?" she asked, as the thug pushed her down a narrow alley. "And do they serve daiquiris there?" she joked, more for her own amusement than his. Most NPCs in the PHENOM had a limited capacity to understand sarcasm.
"In there," the voice said, directing her toward a door at the end of the alley. She opened the door and the thug pushed her through a dark hallway and into another room. It appeared to be a dressing room, and by the looks of the clothing strewn about, the woman who dressed there wore a lot of sequins, feathers, and . . . not much else.
"This must be your mother's room," she remarked, wondering how the PHENOM thug would reply.
"My mother's dead, but she preferred cottons while she was alive."
She twirled around then, not caring about the gun on her neck. PHENOM NPCs don't talk like that. She recognized the steely glint in his eyes from his father, and immediately fury overwhelmed her.
"Adrien Agreste, you little pantywaist," she said, and charged him, despite the gun aimed directly at her head.
Surprise was on her side, fortunately, because Adrien Agreste wasn't quite the pantywaist she just called him. She was tall, but he still had several inches of height on her, and he seemed pretty athletic. And, oh yeah, super hot.
She had speed, though, and she knew where to land a kick.
She kicked hard.
The blow made him drop the gun, which Marinette snatched up and aimed at his hea.
"Your twisted game is over now," she said, as he slumped back against the wall and contemplated her. "I suggest you return home out of the PHENOM this minute before I shoot you back home."
"Who are you?" he asks in a demanding tone, his face unreadable.
"Your father hired me to get you to come home. So let's go."
"Why would my father hire a teenage girl? You're tiny and honestly not that threatening," he said condescendingly.
It took all of her self-control not to give Adrien Agreste another swift kick. She kept steady, but couldn't stop her mouth from tearing into him. "Yes, he did, in fact, hire me, a girl. Nobody else could get through your creepy maze, you freak show, and believe me, you're making me sorry I ever tried. Next time you run away, maybe you should think about all the people you're hurting first. Like your dad's assistant. She's been sitting by your bedside night and day, you know, missing you, not to mention your dad and all the guilt he feels from your suicide note, or whatever it was."
As she yelled, Adrien's face turned from anger to confusion. "They think I ran away?"
"Well, didn't you?"